Kate Moses

31st annual Key West Literary Seminar

January 10–13, 2013andJanuary 17–20, 2013

Kate Moses is author of the internationally acclaimed novel Wintering, a reimagining of the two weeks in late 1962 when Sylvia Plath assembled the manuscript of Ariel, the feverish outpouring of artistic bravado triggered by the breakup of her marriage to Ted Hughes, which Plath rightly predicted would “make my name.” Published in 15 languages and recipient of numerous commendations, including the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, Wintering was praised as “a brilliant, fervent book” that returns humanity to the iconic Plath through its unprecedented rendering of “the poet newly envisioned—fixated on living, not on dying.”

Moses is also the author of Cakewalk, chosen by NPR as one of their favorite memoirs of 2010, a coming-of-age story about surviving a “crummy” childhood thanks to an insatiable appetite for sugar and stories. Alongside tales of “looking for sweetness wherever I could find it,” Moses recounts her early years as a book editor and aspiring writer surreptitiously learning from the literary masters surrounding her. She tells of encounters with M. F. K. Fisher (“She had the look of a woman who had been the kind of little girl who said outrageous things for her own amusement, just to see how people would react”), Samuel Beckett (with whom Moses has an appropriately Beckettesque exchange while delivering a pair of Rockport shoes to his Paris apartment), and formidable, octogenarian Kay Boyle, who became the younger writer’s literary fairy godmother.

A founding editor of Salon, Moses was the co-creator of Salon’s popular daily feature “Mothers Who Think” and co-editor of two critically acclaimed anthologies of essays inspired by the site: the national bestselling, American Book Award-winning Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves.

Moses is currently completing her second novel and is the recipient of a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction. She teaches in the creative writing programs at University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.